Korg D32XD - Modifications to OEM setup - USB upgrade?

H

HogbackVT

New member
Hello All,
Just posting for input into upgrading this awesome DAW's POS USB sys. Anyone have any experience upgrading it to anything above USB 1.0? F me in the A it's slow as can be! UGH! Would be very interested in knowing if there's some specialists out there to do any required re-programming / hardware mods to make it happen! Willing to drop the dime, this thing is epic! Mine's loaded with every extra I think it could come with...except the cool vacuum tube board... =D
Thx
HBVT
 
HogbackVT said:
Hello All,
Just posting for input into upgrading this awesome DAW's POS USB sys. Anyone have any experience upgrading it to anything above USB 1.0? F me in the A it's slow as can be! UGH! Would be very interested in knowing if there's some specialists out there to do any required re-programming / hardware mods to make it happen! Willing to drop the dime, this thing is epic! Mine's loaded with every extra I think it could come with...except the cool vacuum tube board... =D
Thx
HBVT
Click to expand...

USB 2.0 is a totally different protocol and even Msoft had issues with it at first (the Catch 22 "need drivers: no drivers needed" SNAFU) so I cannot see that any upgrade is possible. But what is the problem with 1.1? For sure, copying off large audio files will take a while but things like MIDI should not be affected. USB 1.1 is still about 300 times faster than MIDI baud rate.

Pretty sure you are stuck with what you have.

Dave.
 
Just wondering if there might be anyone out there with the knowledge, to make suggestions on customizing this unit...maybe add a secondary hard drive & usb jack, providing a capability of outputting files via usb 2 or 3 or 4 even, one that would mirror any files automatically that get loaded on the original "PC" area of the D32xD's OEM memory?

So sick of this thing being usb 1.0 I can't get anything done with any speed. Such a turn off for working with the machine personally. UGH!!!
 
I have the D16XD, and have poked about inside mine quite a bit, and done some mods.
I couldn't get the extra 8 channels plug in module, but I did get the Tube preamp module, and the ADAT card.
Adding a Behringer ADA8000 unit gives me the capability of recording 16 tracks at once.
It is a pain trying to operate it through the miserable 1/4 VGA touchscreen.
I think its role is to be a 16 track field recorder, to record a whole band live, then pull all those tracks off via the usb.
I removed the very noisy cooling fan from mine, and it gets by very well without it.
The fan was puny, and was fitted at the bottom of the case (the coolest area).
The D32XD has more circuitry, and TWO power supplies, so I guess that runs a bit warmer.
I had trouble with the high voltage screen backlight sometimes not working, which meant I had to then shine a torch on the screen to see the
button for powering down. I removed the backlight, and fitted an LED backlight, that I got from an LED torch, in the same place. That works fine.
I researched how the screen was driven, to see how an external monitor might be added, and routed all the relevant signals to
a 25-pin D connector, which I added to the rear panel.
You have to just accept the slow usb file transferring.
 
Why a second hard drive? You could just have abigger single one. It shares the bus with the CD writer.
I tried to fit an IDE to SATA interface, but got nowhere.
 
I haven't upgraded the USB on my Korg D32XD, but I don't think it would be too difficult. I'm not sure what the maximum speed is for USB 1.0, but it might be worth upgrading to a newer version if you can find one. There are some people who specialize in doing this kind of thing, so you might want to check into that. Good luck!

--
Jason Hook. I enjoy remixing old songs using Audacity together with UnMixIt for vocal removal or isolation
 
Hogback, I seriously doubt that you'll find any way to upgrade the USB to 2.0. It would require new USB chips and the additional OS upgrades. It's not like you can just write a new driver! Unless someone designed a board to hook into something like the ADAT slot, you're probably stuck in 2003! The D32XD is supposed to be USB1.1 which is good for 12Mbps, which at the time was Ethernet 10BaseT speed ( which back then was considered pretty f'ing fast). Be thankful that you're not stuck transferring tracks via CD/CDRW, which is what my Yamaha AW16G has.
 
Slouching Raymond said:
Why a second hard drive? You could just have abigger single one. It shares the bus with the CD writer.
I tried to fit an IDE to SATA interface, but got nowhere.
Click to expand...
Ahh, Raymond! Reminds me of the good ol' days on Soundtrax.... waiting to see if Korg had really abandoned those of us who'd spent thousands on em... yep! Are you sure it's safe to run without those fans....? I've always been concerned about the heat from the hard drive, tubes on the TPB-2 etc... as well as those rather large chips. I was just about to replace both the fans in mine this week, but, heck, if if you think they can run without!? Have you checked the operating temperatures without them (whilst using maximum amount of inputs/processing)?

Such a shame Korg abandoned it's customers (and since the pandemic you can't get ANYTHING repaired or serviced outside their 12 month guarantee!) as they just needed a few tweaks/additions to the OS - varispeed (to compete with the DPS24mkii), some more work on the pretty crappy DSP reverbs - and some possible hardware/board upgrades; maybe an external monitor/USB2.0 module; not too much to ask for a machine costing $5000..? Nope. I was quick to buy all the modules (really cheaply, mostly in sales after the discontinuation) having a D32xd and D16xd, fitting DIB-8s to both. Consequently, having those 8ch of ADAT i/o, both are still at the centre of my control room (AIB-8/ACB-8 in the D16xd, TPB-2 int'other), running in 2xStereo>MOTU Ultralite, synced via ESI M4U EX and a Midi Thru box... if I need to to bang all 32 tracks over to Pro Tools etc I can switch to the ADAT outs, four passes (and a bit of fiddling/routing), done. The reason I kept them? The pre-amps.

Personal upgrades..? Impossible. Tried every possible IDEtoSATA adapter route to stick an SSD in there (thought I'd cracked it with an MSATA 2.5"caddy with IDE pins>2.5"to3.5" adapter... looked like it was going to format for about a minute aaaaaand... shazbat!) Best thing you can do is pick up as many nos 160GB IDE as your arms can carry.

I dream that one day some clever dick will have the brain to crack open the OS and develop it a bit further. We can but dream.
 

Attachments

  • IMG-20190923-WA0002-01.jpg
    IMG-20190923-WA0002-01.jpg
    113.1 KB · Views: 4
Don't know ANYTHING about the kit involved but on the question of hot hard drives...I have an old NAS drive that ran rather too hot for my liking and so I bolted two ally brackets to the sides and sat the whole lot in an aluminium enclosure. Now gets just pleasantly warm.
You can probably still buy heat shunting sleeves for hard drives?

Dave.
 
TelboyD said:
Are you sure it's safe to run without those fans....?
Click to expand...
Yes I am. The guys at the defunct Studiotrax said "Plug it back in , immediately, you damn fool...", more or less.
Here's the facts:
The hard disk is enclosed in its own enclosure on the underside. If it operated red hot, why enclose it? My hard disk doesn't seem to get hot.
If you open up the D16XD, the main circuit board, with the big chips, is in the left half. The circuitboards on the right side (where the fan is) are mostly just buttons, and
separating the two is a vertical metal wall. The fan is in totally the wrong place, if it were for cooling the chips. The switched mode power supply is on the right, but some way from the fan. What heat there is can easily rise and exit through the hole where the screen flips up, or even warm the aluminium case.

One remaining problem is the noise the hard disk makes, when you want to record in a quiet room.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top